Friday, March 20, 2020

Budget Cuts

Budget Cuts It is said that higher education is the key to success. However, with the outrageous prices for this fundamental learning, it is not easily attained. The new budget cuts that are being created are affecting college students in a negative way. Now more than ever both in state as well as out of state students have to work harder to get the units, books, and money required to fulfill this costly demand. Another factor that comes as a setback is the student's financial status, a situation that the state takes little consideration upon.Unit prices are way too high for the average working student. Statistics have shown that since the year of 1998 unit prices have risen from a twelve dollar unit price to twenty-four dollars. The Universities have increased to as much as two-hundred dollars a unit, so as you can see that is a very dramatic rise. It is a known fact that average paying jobs are not sufficient enough to meet these standards.Another factor is time, not all college students have the flexibility in their schedules to maintain a steady paying job. The rising cost of college tuition coupled with a lack of need-based financial assistance throughout the country is a threat to low-income students preparing for college.Along with units come textbooks, a necessity for each and every college student. Textbook companies are unfair to college campuses, but mostly the students for example if you are using a ninth edition book and the next year the teachers ask you to buy a new revised tenth addition. The price is double what you paid for it the previous semester, but all they really did was add a page or change a few words. So this is the way that they make all their money by ripping...

Tuesday, March 3, 2020

Differences Between an Initialism and an Acronym

Differences Between an Initialism and an Acronym An initialism is an  abbreviation that consists of the first letter or letters of words in a phrase, such as EU (for European Union) and NFL (for National Football League).  Also called an alphabetism.   Initialisms are  usually shown in  capital letters, without spaces or periods between them.  Unlike acronyms, initialisms are not spoken as words; they are spoken letter by letter.   Examples and Observations ABC (American Broadcasting Company, Australian Broadcasting Corporation), ATM (Automatic Teller Machine), BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), CNN (Cable News Network), DVD (Digital Versatile Disc), HTML  (HyperText Markup Language),  IBM (International Business Machines Corporation), NBC (National Broadcasting Company)Some names that began as initialisms have evolved into brands independent of their original meanings. For example, CBS, the American radio and television network, was created in 1928 as the Columbia Broadcasting System. In 1974, the name of the company was legally changed to CBS, Inc., and in the late 1990s, it became CBS Corporation.Similarly, the letters in the names SAT and ACT no longer represent anything. Originally known as the Scholastic Achievement Test, the SAT became an Aptitude Test in 1941 and an Assessment Test in 1990. Finally, in 1994, the name was officially changed to SAT (or, in full, SAT Reasoning Test) , with the letters signifying nothing. Two years later, American College Testing followed suit and changed the name of its test to ACT. Initialisms and Acronyms   My favorite current acronym is the DUMP, a term universally used in Durham, New Hampshire to refer to a local supermarket with the unwittingly unfortunate name the Durham Market Place. Initialisms are  similar to acronyms in that they are composed of the first letters of a phrase, but unlike acronyms, they are pronounced as a series of letters. So most people in the US refer to the Federal Bureau of Investigation as the FBI...Other initialisms are PTA for Parent Teacher Association, PR for either public relations or personal record, and NCAA for National College Athletic Association.(Rochelle Lieber, Introducing Morphology. Cambridge University Press, 2010) [S]ometimes a letter in an initialism is formed not, as the term might imply, from an initial letter but rather from an initial sound (as the X in XML, for extensible markup language), or from the application of a number (W3C, for World Wide Web Consortium). Furthermore, an acronym and an initialism are occasionally combined (JPEG), and the line between initialism and acronym is not always clear (FAQ, which can be pronounced either as a word or as a series of letters).(The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed. The University of Chicago Press, 2010) CD-ROM CD-ROM is an interesting mix because it brings together an initialism (CD) and an acronym (ROM). The first part is sounded letter by letter, the second part is a whole word.(David Crystal, The Story of English in 100 Words. St. Martins Press, 2012) Usage The first time an acronym or initialism appears in a written work, write the complete term, followed by an abbreviated form in parentheses. Thereafter, you may use the acronym or initialism alone.(G. J. Alred, C. T. Brusaw, and W. E. Oliu, Handbook of Technical Writing, 6th ed. Bedford/St. Martins, 2000 AWOL In AWOLAll Wrong Old Laddiebuck, an animated film by Charles Bowers, a woman presents her calling card to a soldier and it reads Miss Awol. She then lures him away from camp without permission. The film is silent, of course, given the 1919 date, but the calling card indicates that AWOL is pronounced as a word, making it a true acronym and not just an initialism.(David Wilton and Ivan Brunetti, Word Myths. Oxford University Press, 2004) Pronunciation: i-NISH-i-liz-em EtymologyFrom the Latin, beginning